I read Ask A Manager, a blog which provides all sorts of useful insight, horror stories and good advice regarding the workplace. It is eye-opening. Go have a squiz. It's a good education, especially if you aren't sure you have a good handle on workplace norms. (hint: most places aren't.)
Screw Your Stupid Poem by Office Gumby "Where I'm from?" I come from home. A poem about home. Of course I'm going to cry. Everyone cries about home, either by the going from or the coming to. And not for the same reasons. "The worst thing I have been told"? That I must write a poem about it. I've already lived through the worst things. I don't see why I should live through them again.
_____________________________________ P.S.: Dear Hellmouth, I greatly love your updates and will miss them sorely once you escape.
I KonMari'd this blog post to leave the most important parts. I realised you didn't really want to hear lots from me on the craft of writing. However, the things I mention in here are things I wish I knew twenty years ago. It has taken me this long to figure these things out.
May they help you as well.
1. Voice. You wanna know what will hook an editor or agent and get them to read on? It's voice. If you ain't got that, nothing else matters, no matter how tight your storyline is or how deep your characters. If you can't hook and editor/agent/reader to want to read on, they'll never discover the other beauty.
2. Attitude. A bit of humility goes a looong way in this industry. A chip on your shoulder will cost you. I presume you're in this for the long run. (I am. I have a Fifty-Year Plan.) Develop a sweet and humble attitude. Others will be happy to work with you if you do.
3. Patience. Assume it's gonna take a long time for stuff to happen. That said, do not procrastinate. Do. Not. Procrastinate. Everything else will take away much of your time in your Fifty-Year Plan. Don't give it any more. Get as much done as quickly as you can, and have patience for the rest.
Question for you: What don't you know right now that you wish you knew?
Yes, Katie Bouman, you should be excited. You and the rest of your team who brought us this really cool science image. A few other people who were involved are Sandra Bustamante, Feryal Ozel, Heino Falcke, and all these people from the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. Congrats, guys!
In case you've been living under a rock or off the grid, you will have heard the news of the first image of a black hole. It looks like this:
A direct image of the black hole at the core of galaxy Messier 87.
Papers linked at the bottom, for those who wanna go hardcore.
A black hole is a final object (greater than ~2M☉) that has collapsed down due to gravity, because there's no other force (like thermal pressure) to counter the gravity.
Are black holes a real thing? Yes. We know them by their gravitational influence, as well as a few other clues. Here's a couple of recent papers that cover a few things about one of the best-studied black holes, Sagittarius A*, in delightfully nerdish details:
So yeah. Black holes, totally real, and we've known and studied them for at least a hundred years. Thing is, due to their nature, we haven't been able to take a picture of one.
It's hard to take a photo-graph of something that doesn't emit or reflect any photons. So, how did they do it?
In their reportings in the Astrophysical Journal, the team shared, "Einstein's general theory of relativity not only predicts the existence of black holes, but also provides a means to directly observe them. Photons can escape from near the event horizon via an unstable circular orbit, whose observational manifestation would be a bright ring of emission surrounding a dark interior black hole "shadow". The diameter of the shadow for a black hole...as seen by a distant observer is predicted to be...larger than twice the...radius of the event horizon due to light-bending effects...."
This method is only successful if: "(i) there are a sufficient number of emitted photons to illuminate the black hole, (ii) the emission comes from close enough to the black hole to be gravitationally lensed around it, and (iii) the surrounding plasma is sufficiently transparent at the observed wavelength."
And it was. I'm impressed.
(I can't believe I've not devoted an entire blog entry to black holes before! Bad astronomer! No cookie!) If you want to see more science content from me on my blog, please comment below. I'm happy to oblige. If not, go buy my books and register your opinion that way.
Do watch this video. She's so excited and passionate by the science. It's contagious. I love her line, "I can't show you a picture of a black hole today [in 2017]."
Never be afraid to go hardcore on science. Even if your gaze glosses over and your brain turns numb, don't ever let that deter you. Read enough abstracts, and eventually things will begin making more sense. Also, whuffie.
The problem with a History of Astronomy project is that much of the original source material is print-only, and mostly out-of-print. I live in Western Australia. Is eBay my friend? Time will tell.
This guy and I are supposed to be best buds for the next few months. But I'm not feeling the love.
Librarians and I are mates, and they're willing to help me, as much as they can.
I now have more library memberships and accompanying cards than a sane, reasonable person should have.
Look, a mango!
Yesterday my mother turns to me as we're walking out of the airport and says, "I just realised, I could have checked that book out of the library [where she lives] and brought it along for you." Yes, you could have. Oh well.
Why do many critics of Sagan say, "Don't get me wrong; I am a fan. But..."
Professors are supposed to be your mates. Why aren't they helping more?!
A BA degree is a degree in BS. I am confident I will be able to spin words of some kind.
Remember to reference! (Kneale 2019)
This guy spent lots of money so the US Library of Congress could acquire Carl Sagan's personal papers. I kid you not.
To a fiction author, twenty pages is a doddle. You can crank that out easily in an afternoon. For a MS thesis, 20 pages is a lifetime plus fifty years, with interest.
You might think print books are romantic. They are not. They are fickle, they are rare, they are forgotten and they have this funny smell that makes your nose itch. Also, many of them do not inhabit Western Australia. Digital is an excellent way to go. All my books are available in digital format. God of the Dark is free. Go get your free ebook and leave an honest review somewhere useful.
Is it morally reprehensible to mark a library book lightly with an erasable pencil? It's morally acceptable for music scores. In fact, it's expected. Just be kind and erase your markings before returning the score. Every musician knows that.
If I wrote in the style of Sagan, would more people wanna buy my books?
_____________________________ Her Grace's brain is being eaten by a thesis.
"The Influence of Science Popularisation: a Case Study of Carl Sagan"
